Suggestions

So you want a version of the Dreamwidth suggestions page working on your Dreamhack. This document should hopefully get you there.

You will need

• A Dreamhack.
• An account on your Dreamhack with admin privs; your default "system" account probably suffices.

Process

• Create a new community called "dw_suggestions"
  • You can't create this normally, because "dw_" is a reserved name. You need to use a user account with "siteadmin:usernames". Assuming you're logged in as "system", go to /admin/priv/?user=system on your Dreamhack, select "siteadmin" from the drop-down at the bottom, and type "usernames" in the text box, then click "Make changes".
  • You should now be able to create the community at /communities/new
• Create a new user called "suggestions_bot"
  • I did this by creating an invite code, and signing up a new user in a private/incognito browser window (so it wouldn't sign out my system user), but other methods for creating a user exist.
• Validate the bot account's email address. Three methods:
  • Edit the database directly to record that the email address has been validated. (If you know what that involves, please update this article with more explicit instructions!)
  • I believe there's an admin command somewhere that will let you mark an account's email as validated; or
  • Just configure the bot with a valid email address, run the workers to get the email sent, and click the validation link you receive. (Check spam if the email doesn't arrive; this is what I ended up doing).
• Make the bot an admin of the community at /communities/dw_suggestions/members/edit
• Make sure you have a paid account so you can post polls. (This seems wrong to me: I'm pretty sure people without paid accounts can post suggestions on the real Dreamwidth, but it was necessary for the thing to work for me.)
  • Give your "system" account the "payments" privilege at /admin/priv/?user=system
  • At /admin/pay/, enter the username you're going to use to make suggestions, and set them to have a paid account.
• The name of the suggestions bot and the community ought to be picked up from ext/dw-nonfree/etc/config-local.pl, but that didn't seem to work for me. I ended up just editing ext/dw-nonfree/htdocs/site/suggest.bml, which is a horrid hack but did the job for what I needed. Please update this if you can find a better solution!
  • Replace my $destination = LJ::load_user( $LJ::SUGGESTIONS_COMM ); with my $destination = LJ::load_user('dw_suggestions');
  • Replace my $suggestions_bot = LJ::load_user( $LJ::SUGGESTIONS_USER ); with my $suggestions_bot = LJ::load_user('suggestions_bot');